My Own Experience Of Pipes

A guest post by Jasmine in Dublin.

I read your post about Ghostwatch and thought it worth looking into further so I decided to read up about it on Wikipedia and strangely enough, the name Pipes is the name my mother gave to an entity we had in our house when I was younger. We’ve since moved from there but I’m wondering did she seen Ghostwatch and is that where she got the name from. Sadly my mother is no longer with us to ask her but it does make me wonder.

The house we lived in was in an old part of Dublin and had been owned by a Jewish family before us. They sold it on when they decided to move on and my parents were delighted to find somewhere they both really loved. We were fairly well off and this was before the times of the Celtic Tiger or anything like that. My dad, being a doctor worked long hours and my mother always seemed to be busy looking after me and my younger brother. We’d a lovely childhood and we loved the house. Looking back on it now, I guess you could say it had character.

As we grew up some things began to happen in the house which left us all puzzled. Things would go missing and of course we kids would get the blame. There seemed to be a habit of the windows opening on their own, or at least so my mother said. These were upstairs windows and heavy wooden frames too and we could never explain how they’d suddenly become open and a draft would be blowing through the house.

With old houses there’s always noise, creaking of floor boards or that but I remember it suddenly getting worse, like a rattling in various parts of the house, always when it was dark and quite unexpectedly. Myself and my brother became quite scared and this is where my mother came up with Pipes as a fictional character to make it less scary. Over time, the noises continued and my mother would smile and say “there’s Pipes”. There was no way this was water pipes or anything of the sort.

An interesting thing happened. I had friends in the neighbourhood as kids do and one evening while having dinner in my friend Danielle’s house, her mother overheard us talking. I was telling Danielle about Pipes and her mother seemed suddenly very interested and a little concerned. A few days later, I asked Danielle over and she told me her mother had said she wasn’t to be in the house because there were bad things in it. This was my house remember. She had told her that the previous family had been so scared they had moved off. I told my own mother this but she laughed it off.

The noises and strange happenings continued and eventually it got to the stage where my mother came and took myself and my brother in the middle of the night and brought us to my grandmothers. I just remember being so scared. I never went back to the house again and after a short stay in my granny's, we moved to the suburbs. As I grew older, my mother told me that she believed that there was something there, something quite evil and she couldn’t take it any more. She never tried to find out what it was because she hadn’t believed it to be anything to do with us specifically, more so the house itself. I’ve thought about maybe finding out about it but think maybe it’s just best left in the past. Just thought I’d share my story with you.